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Session 112 - Radio Galaxies and Jets: VLBI.
Oral session, Thursday, January 18
1st Floor, La Villita Assembly Building
The N galaxy 3C 390.3 is one of the closest (z = 0.06) powerful radio galaxies. VLA observations made with arcsecond resolution show two lobes each with compact structure, separated from a compact nucleus by 130 arcseconds (200 kpc). A very thin weak one-sided jet joins the central core to the northern lobe.
We have used the VLBA in combination with up to four European radio telescopes to image the central core at wavelengths of 1.3, 6, and 18 cm with angular resolution of 0.2, 1.3, and 2.7 mas, respectively.
At 1.3 cm, the inner part of the jet is clearly visible pointing toward a jet feature 2.5 mas (3.7 pc) away. Apparently the jet is focused on a scale smaller than one parsec and remains remarkably well collimated over more than 100 kpc. The jet shows unusual detail breaking up into at least five discrete components which lie along a sharply curved trajectory. The observations at 6 and 18 cm probe a region along the jet which extends more than 20 mas (30 pc) from the core and which appears to have a relatively steep spectrum. Comparison with earlier observations at 6 cm suggests the emergence of new features at a rate of about once every four years with an apparent velocity of 0.5 to 0.7 mas/year (v/c = 3) as well as an apparently stationary bright feature located 4 to 5 mas (7 pc) from the core.
